Machine translation (MT) is the automatic translation of text from one language to another using a computer system. At a basic level, MT provides translations of individual words from one language to another. One type of machine translation is rule-based MT, in which words are translated based on linguistic rules. Generally, rule-based methods first parse an input text and create an intermediate, symbolic representation of the text, and then use this representation to generate the translation of the text in the target language. One drawback of rule-based MT is that it requires large sets of hand-crafted rules and grammars. Another type of machine translation is statistical machine translation, in which the translation is generated based on statistical models. The parameters of the statistical model are derived from bilingual text corpora, and key to the performance of these systems is the availability of massive amounts of translated documents (e.g., in some cases including 80 million words or more) for the major U.N. languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish). For less common languages, large amounts of translated documents are not available. Systems and methods are needed for providing MT without requiring large sets of hand-crafted rules or massive amounts of translated documents.